You Must Change Your Life (35 page)

Freud could not refute this morbid observation; of course all living things had to die. But he disagreed that this inevitability diminished their value in the present. On the contrary, the scarcity of life only made it more precious, he said. But Freud was surprised to find that his maudlin companion was unconvinced by what he thought were these irrefutable truths.

An explanation for Rilke's sadness later came to Freud, at a time when he was confronting his own sequence of sorrows: growing anti-Semitism in Europe, threats to the legitimacy of psychoanalysis
and the onset of a world war in which his children would serve. He wrote in the essay that in Rilke's anticipation of death, he was also anticipating the mourning that would accompany it. Unable to bear that impending grief, he had built up a resistance to ever experiencing its beauty in the first place. One could not mourn what one never loved.

Freud advocated in his essay for adopting a more hopeful and therapeutic outlook. He admitted that the war had “robbed the world of its beauties.” It destroyed nature and demolished historical monuments. “It made our country small again and made the rest of the world far remote. It robbed us of very much that we had loved, and showed us how ephemeral were many things that we had regarded as changeless.”

But unlike Rilke, Freud insisted that the joy of beauty outweighed the cost of mourning it. Even if beauty disappears, grief, too, departs just as abruptly as it arrives. With each ending would come a beginning, Freud said, and with it the opportunity to rebuild “on firmer ground and more lastingly than before.”

The paper helped establish Freud's seminal research on defense mechanisms, the belief that people unconsciously manipulate their perceptions in order to guard themselves against painful emotions. Without knowing it, Rilke, too, may have anticipated this logic even earlier in the first of his
Duino Elegies
. He writes in it of his fear that an angel's love will engulf him: “. . . For beauty is nothing / but the beginning of terror which we can still barely endure.” The longer we admire it, the more devastating its loss will be.

PERCHED ON A STEEP
cliff overlooking the Adriatic Sea, the Duino Castle struck Rilke as a cold, unfeeling colossus when he arrived in the winter of 1911. The dark water was a “featureless, outspread void,” cloaked in mist. There was no green, no sign of vegetation anywhere on the rocky terrain. Situated near the border of Slovenia, this was a
far cry from the Italy Rilke had come to know during his vacations to sandy Capri.

He moved into a corner room facing the sea and opened the window to let the salty air flow in. The austere environment should have instilled Rilke with a sense of discipline, but instead he felt like a prisoner within its stone walls. It enclosed him, too, with an anxiety that had been plaguing him since he left the Hôtel Biron.

Witnessing Rodin's decline had awoken in him the possibility that if he did not confront his fears now, they might continue pursuing him until they one day caught up to him when he was too weak to do anything about it, as Rodin's fear of death had done to him. “The experience with Rodin has made me very timid toward all changing, all diminishing, all failure, for those unapparent fatalities, once one has recognized them, can be endured only so long as one is capable of expressing them with the same force with which God allows them,” he told the princess. For the first time, he thought that therapy could be a useful way to identify and excavate those fears.

Rilke had always been somewhat frightened of Freud and his new science of the mind. He told Andreas-Salomé that he found the psychiatrist's writing “uncongenial” and “in places hair-raising.” He believed psychoanalysis was bleach for the soul, a clearing out. Each time Freud had tried to cultivate a friendship with Rilke over the years, the poet tended to decline his invitations. The year after Freud published “On Transience,” his then-twenty-three-year-old son Ernst “at last met his hero Rilke,” but the encounter did not occur at Freud's house: “Rilke was not to be persuaded to visit us a second time,” Freud wrote.

But in his isolation at Duino, Rilke started to see how a branch of medicine as narratively driven as psychoanalysis could have its benefits for a writer. Rilke was writing so little then anyway, therapy seemed unlikely to make matters worse. He wrote to Andreas-Salomé to see whether she thought Freud's talking cure could help him. “Dear Lou,
I am in a bad way when I wait for people, need people, look around for people . . .” he wrote.

When she received the letter she skimmed through his complaints of depression, muscle pains and loss of appetite before reaching a truly disturbing passage. It did not concern any of his usual ailments, but instead described the way he had written his most recent poem.

It took place on a gusty January day. In Duino, the cold northern wind from the Hungarian lowlands could collide with warm gales coming up from the Sahara Desert and cause storms as apocalyptic as an El Greco painting. On one such afternoon, Rilke stepped out for some air just as the sky was darkening. He was too preoccupied with an important letter he had to write to notice the weather. From the castle, the princess watched him pacing the cliff, hands jammed in his pockets, head bowed in thought.

Then he heard a voice in the wind: “Who, if I cried out, would hear me among the angels' hierarchies?” it said. Rilke stopped in his tracks and listened. He wrote the sentence down in his notebook, and with it the first line of his
Duino Elegies
. When he went back inside the castle, the rest of the poem poured out of him. In describing this surge of inspiration to Andreas-Salomé, he admitted that he hardly felt like its author at all. He felt like he had been inhabited by a higher power. “The voice which is using me is greater than I,” he later told the princess.

Rilke's account troubled Andreas-Salomé. From the way he told it, it was as if the hand that wrote the words had not existed at all. The disembodied description bordered on self-denial and was an extreme manifestation of the bodily alienation that she had long thought caused his recurrent illnesses. So when Rilke asked her whether he should go to Munich to undergo psychoanalysis, she encouraged him.

He also ran the idea by Westhoff, who was already in therapy, and she told him he'd be a coward not to at least try it. Rilke then wrote to Westhoff's psychiatrist to inquire about his candidacy for treatment.
He told the doctor that he believed his work had been “really nothing but a self-treatment” all along. The problem was that it no longer seemed to be having its effect.

But before Rilke could make the trip, Andreas-Salomé rushed him a telegram: Don't do it, she pleaded. She had a sudden change of heart and now believed that the risk that analysis posed to his creativity was too great. It might well chase out the angels along with the demons.

Rilke decided that she was right. Perhaps he needed a little madness to push him through the rest of the
Elegies
. Had the opportunity for treatment arisen during his long battle with Malte, he might have jumped at it. And if he opted to one day transition into a “noncreative” profession, as he had contemplated doing after he finished that book, he would consider it again. But for now he had made up his mind not to undergo psychoanalysis so long as he was a poet.

Instead, he would finish out the miserable winter walking barefoot in the frost of Duino and Andreas-Salomé would continue acting as his unofficial therapist, as she had been doing for nearly fifteen years. She had recently also begun analyzing his dreams. In one, Rilke told her he stood in a zoo, encircled by cages of animals. One of them contained a pale lion, which he told her had triggered associations with the French words for “remembered” and “mirrored.” At the center, a nude man posed, enveloped in violet and gray shadows, like a figure model in a Cézanne painting. The man was not a lion tamer, but was himself “put on exhibit with the animals,” Rilke said.

Andreas-Salomé did not record her interpretation of the dream, which contained so much imagery from Paris and the
New Poems
. But she suggested that, in lieu of psychoanalysis, perhaps Rilke ought to return there for a while. She had not cared for his
New Poems
, which to her felt emotionally barren, but at least they had grounded him in the physical world. After all his recent talk about voices in the wind at Duino, she thought he could use a dose of harsh Parisian reality once more.

     

RILKE TOOK HER ADVICE
in the spring of 1913. He returned to his old apartment on the Rue Campagne-Première and promised to fulfill one final favor to Westhoff. She was still living in Munich, with Ruth now as well, when she told him of her enduring wish to sculpt a bust of Rodin. The artist had already given her his consent, but she wasn't sure if it was sincere because he had since gone silent. Rilke promised he would talk to him for her.

Trusting that Rilke would come through, Westhoff arrived in Paris to begin work in April. Over the next two months, Rilke wrote repeatedly to Rodin, pleading with him to pose for her. He told him how a museum in Mannheim had already commissioned the bust and now her professional reputation depended on it. When that failed to elicit a response, he tried appealing to Rodin's ego, making the case that a subject as great as him could be just the thing to awaken Westhoff's latent genius. He quoted to him a letter in which she had written, “I never dared hope that Rodin would sit for me.”

In return, Rilke received only a polite response that seemed to deliberately avoid mention of the favor. Finally Rilke told Westhoff that Rodin simply did “not want to hear of sitting for the bust for the moment.” The artist had not officially declined, but he wouldn't commit, either. They had one last chance to plead their case in May, when Rodin invited Rilke and Westhoff to join him for breakfast in Meudon. They spent a lovely morning together and before they left Rilke confirmed plans to come by again with his publisher a few days later. They were to pick up some photographs of Rodin's work to illustrate a new edition of the monograph.

Rodin had agreed to release the images, but when Rilke returned on the appointed day, the artist had inexplicably changed his mind. He refused to give Rilke the photos and he would not say why. Rilke vowed that this second broken promise would be the last he would tolerate from Rodin. Westhoff knew that she had no chance of convincing Rodin to sit for her on her own, so she returned to Munich
and settled on sculpting a bust of Rilke's friend the Czech baroness Sidonie Nádherný.

“He can't be counted on for anything anymore,” Rilke concluded. Rodin's reckless mood swing was “as unexpected” now as it was when he fired Rilke eight years earlier. But this time the poet knew it was “probably final and not to be made up.”

CHAPTER
18

A
S THE AVANT-GARDE BROKE GROUND IN THE CITY, RODIN
defiantly declared himself a member of the
avant-derniers
. At the 1913 Salon de la Société Nationale, Rodin displayed a thoroughly unfashionable marble bust of Puvis de Chavannes, an artist whose reputation for decorative, “wallpaper” painting was driving his descent into irrelevance in the fifteen years since his death. But Rodin maintained he was a genius and was willing to risk his own reputation in his defense.

Already operating on the margins of Paris's contemporary art scene, Rodin began to flee farther from the city still. He started spending weekends in the south, learning to paint with Renoir, and teaching him sculpture in return. The painter was by then so old and arthritic that he had to tie the brush to his wrist. Rodin, too, had some difficulty, but it brought him a childlike joy to learn a new skill at his advanced age.

He also made pilgrimages to his beloved cathedrals, observing them with all the unjaded awe that he had as a boy in boarding school. He began sketching their columns, moldings, stained glass and canopies and jotting down his impressions. Since he had been paying homage to past masters lately, he could not forget the buildings to
which he owed his education more than anyone. The cathedral was the mother of all sculpture, the body that bore carvings on her surfaces for centuries before the reliefs, ornaments and statues climbed off her walls to stand on their own as individual works of art. Rodin couldn't imagine sculpture as we know it existing at all without cathedrals.